Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday May 16, 2012 @11:25AM
from the just-get-an-iphone-instead dept.

zacharye writes, quoting BGR: "The launch of Sprint's flagship EVO 4G LTE has been delayed indefinitely and supply of AT&T's flagship HTC One X will be constrained as a result of ongoing patent disputes between HTC and Apple. HTC confirmed in a statement emailed to BGR on Tuesday evening that shipments of its new EVO 4G LTE and One X smartphones have been held up by United States Customs as part of an International Trade Commission investigation. Before the phones can clear Customs, the ITC will need to determine that HTC's new handsets are in compliance with an earlier ruling..."

Well that's pretty much total bullshit. Google wins when it gets its services running on as many handsets as possible regardless of who manufactures them. They make money from monetizing users in terms of the data they gather and increasingly from selling apps and other content.

Interesting. You're saying Google will buy Motorola Mobility (not a bad prediction, given the wheels are in motion and they've declared their intent to), then SEND SERGEY BRIN back to THE YEAR 2011, whereupon he'll meet a dying Steve Jobs and say "Help us out here Jobsie ol' pall, I know you don't like us much, but if you could initiate a lawsuit against HTC, that'd help us bunches. Thank you!"

I'd stay away from it because it has "Microsoft" and "Windows" in the name. I simply don't like the Windows Way. I don't want an OS or program to be friendly, I want it to be obediant. I want it to do what I want it to do and I want it to do it like I want, not how some developer wants. I don't want shiny if it means less workable.

Too bad they don't put the people who did Excel on their Windows team, Excel is actually the best spreadsheet out there.

Please do not think that a massive intake of cash by the lawyers in this case doesnt lead to quite a bit of cocaine purchasing power. Thats right kids, a dollar spent on apple products buys at least 10 cents of cocaine.

what ipod touch are you using? I have a second generation model from ~2008 or 2009, and it upgraded to ios5 no problem. As for apps, I've read a couple cases of malicous updates, but generally speaking the apps that do that are spanked in the press / blogosphere. what apps have you had a problem with in this regard?

Having been picked on at the start, Apple has become one of the biggest bullies on the block. It's as if the Ugly Duckling rather than go swanning (heh) around saying "Look how pretty I am" decided "Right, now I'm 4x the size of those bastards who picked on me. Time for some payback" and went on a revenge spree.

Having been picked on at the start, Apple has become one of the biggest bullies on the block. It's as if the Ugly Duckling rather than go swanning (heh) around saying "Look how pretty I am" decided "Right, now I'm 4x the size of those bastards who picked on me. Time for some payback" and went on a revenge spree.

This is one of those very rare times were I want to see some hacker group take Apple down. Certainly some "Anonymous" guy was looking forward to his new OneX.

Oh what a surprise, we both got Troll mods. I love how rabid Apple fanbois get when they believe their darling is under attack. It's such a beautiful mirror of Apple's extremely agressive defensiveness - no dissent can be permitted under any circumstances.
And trust me, if I was trolling you would know about it.

They can't do this so easy though as I'm sure that Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and Google combined have more patents than Apple. Wait until they all respond in kind. Then no one wins but the lawyers. It's MADD. Is Apple nuts?

I like you data, and I know this off subject but since FaceBook is valued so highly, you would think they would have a few more patents. They would have to earn $2 or $3 trillion in the next few years to even match the ROI of Google let alone Microsoft or Apple. "Big Bad" Microsoft comes to mind. If you would have invested in just a few shares in 1986 your increase would have been somewhere around 36,000% give or take 2,000% depending upon where you get you figures from. Apple may be overvalued because they

Apple already destroyed the competition by having a superior product. Symbian, Microsoft and Blackberry phones began a steep decline after the iPhone was introduced, and before any lawsuits. In all markets where there is no legal restriction to selling competing tablets, the iPad still rules.

If Apple won purely on quality, and consumer demand, then Apple would need all the patent scams.

They did win on quality and consumer demand. They were 25% of the US smartphone market within two and a half years of release (one new vendor on one carrier vs. multiple established vendors on all carriers), and wouldn't file their first offensive iPhone lawsuit for another couple months.

I do see a difference. Microsoft threatened HTC and others with a lawsuit if they didn't pay because Microsoft was on the botto

Do you know of any publicly held companies that aren't even and bent on destroying their competition using all means available including but limited to incessant lawsuits?

You can't be serious.

The vast majority of publicly held companies go about their business without trying to kill off the competition.Doing so is a costly distraction, which seldom ever succeeds. Its far more often found that big companies formtrade associations and collude than go after each other with daggers. Having competition is very useful.Not having competition simply invites regulation. That's why MacDonalds gets along with Burger King,AT&T and Verizon share tower space, Union Pacific and Burlington Pacific and Santa Fe share tracks, Bayercross licenses with Pfizer.

Your assumption that all publicly traded companies are in a death struggle suggests a hopelessly paranoidview of corporations that seems to be in vogue today.

Companies make deals with companies all the time, so what. Take Apple (sic) and Samsung for instance. Samsung is a primary vendor of product to Apple and yet they have lawsuits going back and forth constantly.

Companies of all sizes uses lawsuits to delay or stop their competitors all the time. Larger companies with deeper pockets will often sue individuals or smaller companies with smaller pockets with annoying and perhaps not winnable lawsuits to scare them into line.

Giving all money away? Where did that come from? How is that possibly germane?

Corporations have far more than one goal in mind, and making money is at bes number two or three on the list.If ALL that mattered was making money, Pfizer would stop wasting money making Viagra and start building smartphones oropening Casinos in Vegas.

Giving away all profits would show some selflessness, would indicate something other than a concern for the bottom line. It's something that even rich humans do on occasion but it is not something that is even imaginable for a corporation.

Consider what happens to company executives who don't make maximum profit for their company. They're fired.

Making money is always the primary concern if not the only real concern. Pfizer's core business is drugs of course they're not going to branch out into cell phones

I know you're trolling, but actually, Apple's lawsuit against HTC is over certain software patents related to URL handling and so on, not what the phone looks like. It's even thinner ice than a design patent suit.

Either way, it's amusing to see the "zomg Apple is evil!" comments on this story contrasted with the "haha good on Samsung, totally legit!" when the reverse was the case in Germany and Apple had to pull products.

In my opinion it's all just getting ridiculous, with some of these suits hinging on the

The Apple is evil comments are because Apple fired the first salvo in this war. Yes, most of the suits on either side are nonsense, but its only understandable to enjoy seeing a bully get hoisted by their own petard...

sell these to Sprint knowing they would be held up at customs and possibly not be able to sell them in the US?

Inasmuch as the act of "selling a phone better than the iPhone outside of Apple's release schedule" seems to be enough to get your phone's sales stopped by Apple these days, I suppose the answer is technically "yes".

sell these to Sprint knowing they would be held up at customs and possibly not be able to sell them in the US?

Actually MILLIONS already entered the country and were sold by AT&T and independent retailers. Only when this phone started takingserious sales away from Apple did they start complaining.

HTC has long ago removed the offending patent item [bgr.com]. (And Apple ultimately lost on all other claims in this particular suit.) A single item in the '694 patent [google.com] was upheld, namely having a url sent in a text message be treated as a real url and launching the browser when tapped. (My ancient Razr feature phone did that - sans the tapping part).

You do realize that most buyers were not Apple fans, right? In fact, the term "halo effect" was coined in this context to describe people who became Apple fans because of buying iPhones, making them more likely to buy Apple computers.

using components from popular MP3 player.

There was pretty much no hardware or software in common with the iPod of the time when the iPhone was released.

Ah, only on slashdot can someone with a dissenting opinion, laid out in similar style to the post its replying to be classified as a paid astroturf.

I assume you're not going to accuse the GGP post of being an anti-Apple shill?

Didn't think so.

Either way, the assertion that the iPhone only sold to "absurdly loyal fans" is disproved by simple numbers - it has sold in far greater numbers than the total number of Apple Mac computers that exist, and continues to do so. Far more than could be attributed to the "ab

There's a problem with how you define one or more of the following:facthalo effect

Fact: Most original iPhone buyers were not current Apple fans, or even product owners. Apple had $1.2 billion in yearly sales in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe before the iPhone. The iPhone's release drove that up to $22 billion the next year.

Halo effect was coined: You need to understand the definition of context, as in the how the term "halo effect" was used in this context.

Can't find any info yet on the patent in question, but Apple had won a patent ruling back in December. HTC was suppose to resolve it to avoid an import ban. Here are the details.

The patent in question, 5,946,647 was granted in 1999 and covers identifying data "having recognizable structures," such as a "phone number, post-office address, e-mail address, and name." Then, the patent says, a "parsing process" will allow "appropriate actions" to be taken

If this is still the issue, thank god that the courts are there to protect inventors of such important magnitude. It's horrible to think that someone who could come up with the idea of parsing a phone number would not be adequately compensated. I can't imagine how much R&D Apple has spent in the process. An import ban is the only appropriate resolution.

BTW, in this legal case, Apple had sued for 10 separate patents. Out of the 10, this is the only one that the courts upheld. I can't imagine what the other 9 were like.

The patent was filed in 1996. The C2 wiki [c2.com] has been doing this since 1995. Camel case words are automatically converted to hyperlinks. (And coincidentally, the next Slashdot story is an interview with its inventor, Ward Cunningham.) Shortly afterwards, I copied the idea in my company's issue tracking system. Identifiers like "Q1234" were automatically converted to hyperlinks to the page describing the issue.

I know Apple's patent isn't exactly the same thing, but once you've had the idea of recognising

Hey HTC, maybe you can upgrade the last glut of ICS-capable phones to ICS before you worry about selling your latest and greatest to us? I thought it was a no-brainer that my fully-capable myTouch 4G slide would be upgraded to ICS when I bought the phone 8 months ago. My next phone will not be an HTC one, let alone a One X.

The problem with the ICS upgrades for these phones is that there are no ICS-compatible binary drivers available for the radios on them, and no hardware vendors (to my knowledge) release the source code for their radio drivers. So until an official ICS build is released by the manufacturer that the drivers can be extracted from, it'll be impossible to get ICS running on them. So it's not just a matter of "Do your ICS upgrade yourself".

I haven't personally done any kernel development, so I may be oversimpli

PRETTY sure he isn't demanding anything. If he was (like me) coming from an iPhone to an android phone, then yes software updates are expected. When they don't come of course you are going to be disappointed.
I was promised a software update to my phone "within the next couple months" when I bought it. It came with 2.2, by time I got 2.3 NINE MONTHS LATER 4.0 was already out.
I went back to my 3gs iphone. It's over 3 years old and running the latest iOS just fine. It actually works better than my yea

So you demand continous free software upgrades from every hardware vendor you buy stuff from?

HTC provides rooting methods for all their phones since the last 2 years. Do your ICS upgrade yourself and stop making off-topic posts

Well, there's the rub. Android is meant to be a decent competitor to iOS (and it is) but the sort of crap foisted on the user base by handset makers who simply abandon the old models without providing an upgrade path to the newer versions of Android only takes away from that.

It's likely the main reason that such a tiny percentage of Android handsets are running ICS (compared to a large proportion of iOS devices being at the most current main release [iOS 5] of that operating system, even if they're not all

Well, there's the rub. Android is meant to be a decent competitor to iOS (and it is) but the sort of crap foisted on the user base by handset makers who simply abandon the old models without providing an upgrade path to the newer versions of Android only takes away from that.

Android fragmentation? Blame Microsoft. Seriously. As evidenced in the B&N ordeal, MS's Linux Extortion agreement stipulations require the phone manufacturers re-up the ante and pay more for each version of Android the MFGs push out on a device. THIS is why older hardware is lagging behind. Not that they don't want to push out newer OS updates, but that they have to pay the MS Tax each time they do so. I mean, the hardware's not THAT different on new models, the differences are minimal in the sof

Hello fellow MT4GS owner, allow me to introduce you the magic of community ROMs. I've been running an unofficial CM9 build from here [xda-developers.com] on mine recently, and it only has a handful of bugs. The current builds are using a 2.6 kernel because the 3.0 tree isn't playing nice with the keyboard. It is a completely open community project, so you can watch progress on the TeamDS github page [github.com].
It sucks that HTC and/or T-Mobile aren't providing us with an official ICS ROM, but when you buy a phone you are buying that

Well, I guess it's the Apple Zealots turn, after all the Android Zealots were cheering after Apple's handsets were held back from sale in Germany. It's not really a case of "other companies allowing" Apple to get away with things - that would be the legal system.

Personally I think it's all just getting stupid - most of these patent suits are bullshit, on both sides.

If you were unlucky enough to put in a pre order for the Evo with Sprint, there's no way to get a refund. You're just stuck, with your money tied up, waiting for patent disputes that could take forever.

Are you sure of that? Granted, I've never done a pre-order with them... but every encounter I have had with Sprint's customer service has been excellent. Maybe you could try having them switch you over to the Galaxy Nexus? I just got two - one for me and one for the wife - and we love them.